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Feels Like Home Again: Collected Poems

Joel Weishaus

ISBN 978-1935084-26-6

220 pages: $18.00

March, 2014

Feels Like Home Again traces forty years of Joel Weishaus’ natural, poetic and spiritual life, from a military post in Massachusetts, to the San Francisco of the 1960s, to the mountains of Japan and Northern California, to New Mexico’s high desert; and from modernism to the thrums of post-modernism. In this collection, Weishaus, who is mainly known as a Digital Literary Artist and literary critic, reveals deeper levels of his past and its aesthetics.

Joel’s poems reveal a man’s life lived not in a chair as spectator, but in travel, physical labor, attending to and repairing the broken and outworn. He takes us into the heart of Chinese, Japanese, Native American and Buddhist landscapes, paying attention to a “rock in shadows,” a stick of bamboo, a bent nail or a grasshopper. He reminds us of the power of the particular.—Dennis Patrick Slattery, author of The Beauty Between Words: Collected Poems, and Just Below the Water Line: Selected Poems.

What a collection (and covering all four seasons) from soldiering “in a freezing wind,” loving women, children, the Tao, to the wonders of Nature, such as trees, grasshoppers & Earth. Joel’s unique way sparks the imagination and I bow to his wisdom.—David H. Rosen, M.D., is the author of ten books, most recently, Clouds and More Clouds.

One of the shortest poem in this wonderful collection reads: “Lucky cat, stretching in the sun, knows where it itches.” Joel Weishaus’s poems will turn you into that lucky cat; his writing is solar, and he shows us where it itches. —Ginette Paris, author of (most recently) Heartbreak: New Approaches to Healing.

Without sentimentality, Joel Weishaus honours the beauty of the everyday, inspiring the reader to make peace with life, no matter how difficult life seems.—Laurence Coupe, author of Beat Sound, Beat Vision: The Beat Spirit and Popular Song.

Joel Weishaus was born in Brooklyn, New York. At age 19, he was a Jr. Executive on Madison Ave. He quit when he was 21, and a few years later moved to San Francisco, where he edited On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing (City Lights, 1971). His translation, Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Block Prints by Arthur Okamura, was published by the Cranium Press. (San Francisco, 1971.) He moved to New Mexico in 1977, where he wrote the Introduction and Notes to Thomas Merton’s Woods, Shore, Desert (Museum of New Mexico, 1983). Weishaus was an Adjunct Curator at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and a Writer-in-Residence at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. His book, The Healing Spirit of Haiku, co-authored with David Rosen and illustrated by Arthur Okamura, was published by North Atlantic in 2004.